The Magic Umbrella

Rachel B. Glaser is a rule breaker, which is a terrible way to start off talking about this, Pee on Water; bland as more haughty platitudes, but, whatever: when I was reading this book, the most promising short fiction I’ve encountered in near forever — I was, like, What am I going to write on the Internet about this rakish, precious creature; or Where am I going to put, in my understanding, the way this thing makes everything feel, in this room, on this bed, holding these stories, in the world. Two possibilities, in the matter of even figuring out how to open my mouth about it, occurred eventually. One mentions the technical mutant-ness (product of an implicit, albeit devious, acumen) of the book upfront or one’s smitten foremost with the charm, wit, emotional derring-do, hilarious truth, and clever bruises in the thematic treatment of woolliest angles of this human problem/definition. Whatever approach, the major accomplishment is really how fiction achieves in all this.

Here is a special book; I read it, it made me feel happy, and I had to write a friend an email asking her why nobody else contemporary or comparable to the young Rachel B. Glaser writes as epiphanic structures as these or plays with the purpose and effect of fiction with such verve. In the consideration of recent stories, I want to read Rachel B. Glaser all the time instead of anybody else her age and range who somebody publishes — even though I am wracked for anything cognizant in the way of my response or critique. She woke me up sneakily, Glaser, in a fashion hard to articulate — or, like, just put things out of order in a way that made it all hurt and shine. Something like this, as has been pointed out, is not supposed to work. Given more general attention, the Pee on Water stories might meet with some critical harrumphing over the giddy-rude-earnestness, the diamondy lumpiness, the sophomoric timbre. These are the sort of stories that flip backward through the glass of tall windows instead of taking the stairs.

She remembers, for us, fiction can do anything, actually, and just forgets to — lethargically flopping shy of new capacities because we don’t desire what we don’t expect. The opportunities allowed the form are incredible: as long as a writer architects for her fiction a hermetic operational math (whatever that is… I guess I mean, as long as a readable method is presented for the prosaic world we’re accessing), she can tear it the fuck up: laterally, through the bizarro dark places of the heart, wormed about at witchy exercise. The narrativity of a kind of story like Glaser’s spews contrarily and wide — astonishing readerly expectations for how literary structures ought to play out. Glaser’s debut collection punches open with “The Magic Umbrella,” a laughing, stitched-up ramble that’s, closer looked into, the upsettingly smart and adventurous intro to a whole new kind of way to get at us and leave it all crumpled and amazed. A cute snatch of grade school juvenilia — “One day there was a girl whose name was Jen. She was a secondgrader. Jen was running to catch the bus when she saw that it was raining. She ran back to get her umbrella” — provides a site for launching into a textuality that, umbrella-like, springs into a dream song on authorship, on authoring, out to where the fictive realizes.

“If I don’t know what is going to happen in a story, it feels like it is happening to me,” said Rachel. Read Pee on Water: it’s surprising — accessible, even friendly, it’s far away from callow complexes, morbid distancings: the more fun-house it gets, the less rote, the riskier its whole shtick pulls it off. Glaser’s technical moxie demonstrates most “experimentally” in the toy-like, fluidly intricate, textual prowess of, for one example, “Iconographic Conventions of Pre- and Early Renaissance: Italian Representations of the Flagellation of Christ,” wherein the essayistic unspools into vociferous considerations of repetition/transmission. The piece jumps from site to site straying after its thematic resonance. We discover how there is room, in a consideration of the flagellation of Christ, for Kobe Bryant describing an alleged sexual assault, and before it really makes sense, everything is dancing together, everything, put up, is poetry.

Pee on Water takes the upsettingness and glory of the information used to puzzle out what we are, takes this stuff and, with existential sass (rather than sickly irony and mock criticality — looking at you, hipster writers), puts chunks in a car together, or programmed within a video game, or trapped in an escape pod adrift in outer space, or confusedly standing in front of an old lady’s cadaver, or yearning out on the lawn, desperately sentimental; the familiar and its opposite toss around and turn out mirroring each other. In a standout story “The Jon Lennin Xperience,” a regular-esque, semi-uncomfortable guy is introduced to an immersive bootleg video game that simulates the daily experiences of John Lennon; the gamer, increasingly obsessed, eschews his participation in the dimensional world to assume the virtual identity of the musician-character. What the Lennon experiences and those outside the simulation mean for each other, nested further into each other, trouble the narrative; and, whether the game life is an analogue for the “real” life, a commentary, or whatever — the technology and the humanity wrap around each other imperfectly and significantly. There are miracles in every story in this book, seriously, and still I’m overwhelmed too much to attempt cataloging them comprehensively.

When done with Pee on Water I wanted to keep holding it, I wanted to gift it away quick to friends, I wanted to watch the author answer some emails, but then I didn’t immediately have anything to say about it, though I knew that Glaser’s formal temper and emotional intelligence, and everything else, here in this Pee on Water are definitely, now that we know, what we need. I almost didn’t remember reading a chapbook of her poetry some months back, so maybe her verse doesn’t fascinate as readily (as to be forgotten blithely) as this, but damn is this collection a loud promise that there’s still something left to do, right now, with this form, here in America; easily, it’s one of the most notable titles released in ’10, also, which piques my interest in the small venture called Publishing Genius for putting it out. There is, yeah, Gary Lutz, but besides him I’m not confident I’m wetting my pants over any living American short fiction writer in recent memory the way that it happens when I think about this gorgeously written book and its author. So let me say this: These are thirteen stories that will be read and believed in.